The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
’89 The Unfinished Revolution by Nick Thorpe
| 25 November 2009 | By Marcus Tanner
For the most part he delivers this huge and complicated task with brio and aplomb, employing a personal style that does much to bring the complicated political and social changes that have overtaken the region to life.
Not surprisingly, given his long years in Hungary and his fluency in this notoriously difficult language, his portrait of this still little known country is masterful. A sensitive and charitable listener, his antennae are attuned to the fine distinctions in Hungarian society that pit metropolitan townies against against the more national feelings of the countryside, as well to the subtle and coded subtexts that lie behind such broad political labels.
Moreover, Hungary is a good place to start this panoramic portrait of a half-continent and not simply because of the rather obvious fact that it lies slap bang in the middle of the former Warsaw Pact states. Victims of an injurious peace settlement after the First World War, which left millions of Hungarians outside their newly constituted national state, Hungary is not as self-contained as it appears to outsiders, having an obvious interest in the fate of its minority in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia.
Thorpe makes full use of that insider knowledge, without falling into the trap of presenting the history of those countries from a Magyar perspective. Perhaps it is not strange that his coverage of Poland is also fine, for the Hungarians and Poles have much in common – and know it. Both former “master” nations in the region, each has a strong memory of past grandeur, a feeling that nothing can quite match up to a lost golden age and a vision of itself of an often unappreciated torchbearer of Western values in the region.
Thorpe wears his liberal heart on his sleeve and clearly warms to epic nature of the conflict between the democratic and civilisational aspirations of these wounded countries and their decrepit, Soviet-installed rulers.
Inevitably, given the breadth of his canvass, some bits are weaker than others. The problem with Yugoslavia is that while its hideous implosion can hardly be left out of the narrative, it doesn’t really fit the rest of the story. In some ways more purely Balkan even than Romania, the trajectory of its recent history has little in common with what was going on in Budapest, Prague or Gdansk. Croats, Serbs and Kosovo Albanians may have reached for plausible sounding slogans about democracy, but their bloody struggles had much more to do with sorting out the aftermath of the collapse of the Austrian and Ottoman empires than with the dream of restoring the lost world of Mitteleuropa. Thorpe struggles to make sense of this very particular world and doesn’t always succeed. As he freely admits, much like the Western powers, he abandoned Bosnia – in his case because his first child was about to be born.
The author is at his best when relating broad events to his own experiences. As the father of five children, he is well placed, therefore, to discuss one of the most pressing problems every country with the exception of Kosovo faces – the rapidly falling birthrate. His chapter on the horrendous standard of care for pregnant women in Hungary, practically forbidden to give birth at home and subjected to the tyranny of unfeeling and often corrupt doctors, does more to shed light on why women don’t have many children than any number of sociological articles on the subject I have read. The description of how his wife, Andrea, nearly gave birth under a living room Christmas tree that was then busily shedding its sharp needles is also extremely funny.
In fact, much of the book is humorous, without falling over into pastiche, and thank goodness for that; Thorpe never loses his eye for flavoursome details.
I met Nick on the balcony of his flat in Budapest a few years ago, when he seemed full of regret for not having written a book on his experiences much earlier. Well, what of it? This book has been long in gestation and has been worth waiting for.
’89 The Unfinished Revolution by Nick Thorpe
Reportage Press, UK £12.999
